path: root/draft/rfd4/rfd4.txt

Libre Society                                                      A. Yu
Request for Discussions: 4                    The 2nd School Aff. to FDU
                                                           19 April 2022


                Nonfree Software Mandates and Lockdowns
                       Request for Discussions 4

Abstract

   During COVID, many governments mandate usage of nonfree software on
   ordinary citizens, with questionable constitutionality.  Some
   governments impose extreme lockdown.  This memo discusses its
   injustices and consequences.

Status of This Memo

   This memo documents a small email thread to the LibrePlanet-discuss
   maialing list[THREAD] and adds some elaboration.

   This document is a draft.

   This document describes the author's viewpoint.  Distribution of this
   memo is unlimited.

Table of Contents

   1.  Original Message  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   1
   2.  Reply from jahoti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   3.  Epilogue  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   4.  Conclusion  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   5.  Government Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   6.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   7.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   Contributors  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9

1.  Original Message

   I am a secondary school student from Shanghai, China.  This email
   discusses the problems I discovered in the Chinese educational
   system, in terms of students' right to freedom in computing and
   options to control the COVID-19 pandemic from the standpoint of a
   person living in China.






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   When COVID-19 broke out in 2020, students were required to watch
   lecture videos produced by the city's education department for twenty
   minutes, then join the Tencent Meetings room to discuss in their own
   class for 10--15 minutes.

   Watching the videos wasn't an issue for me.  Our apartment has cable
   TV, where the videos are broadcast; there was also a website that
   played the livestream without JavaScript.  However, Tencent Meetings
   presented a problem to me.

   At the time, I run Arch Linux.  (Currently, I run Hyperbola GNU/
   Linux-libre, a Free Software-only distribution, which would have made
   this even harder.)  Tencnet Meetings, claiming to support "all
   operating systems and platforms", only supports Windows and macOS.
   (I wonder how they passed the resolution to display that statement, I
   believe that they have many programmers who use GNU/Linux.)  (As of
   October 2021, a classmate noted that there is a "Linux versuon".)
   School required Tencent Meetings, therefore I went through a hard
   proccess to setup QEMU running a Windows 7 virtural machine---I
   believed that 7 would be slightly better than 10 in terms of privacy,
   though as always with nonfree software, I can't really know for sure.
   It was slightly unstable, which is an annoyance, for example the
   connection from the Windows audio server to pulseaudio would stop
   working from time to time, but it was acceptable.  Though my setup
   was okay (in the perspective of my school), it left me in a
   psycological crisis about education and freedom.  More on that later.

   Offline classes resumed in May 2020, as most of China has minimal
   cases of COVID-19.  This freed me from using a proprietary non-
   privacy-respecting bloated piece of software in a virtual machine,
   but it did not free me from teachers' requirement to use WeChat
   (think of it as the equiv of WhatsApp in China), Xiaoheiban (A
   proprietary classroom information distribution system), or other
   pieces of nonfree software.

   Similar to the beliefs stated in the GNU Education project, I believe
   that schools and educaion are a means of sharing information and
   knowledge.  I understand that meeting software and lesson management
   software are used as means of distributing knowledge, rather than the
   knowledge being distributed themselves.  However, I believe this
   doesn't lead to the argument that the mandate of proprietary software
   usage is just, for three reasons as below.

   1.  There are always going to be curious students who wonder how the
       technology works.  Proprietary software denies them this right.

   2.  The usage of proprietary software when young may implant
       dependence on it in the future.



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   3.  Education is a right and a responsility.  Mandating nonfree
       software in education adds unjust responsibilities on students.

   Point 1 and 2 are explained well in the Education section of the GNU
   website, therefore I am not going to focus on them.  Focusing on the
   third point:

   Under laws of almost all countries, citizens have the right to an
   education.  Traditionally, this involves going to school, meeting
   teachers and classmates, listening to classes, taking notes, passing
   exams (I have strong opinions that exam systems ought to change to
   better represent individual talents, but this is out of scope of this
   memo.) and finishing homework.  Students loose a slight bit of their
   time and freedom of movement (as in, it's not easy to move to a house
   100 miles away from school), in exchange for being educated.

   However, with schools requiring the use of nonfree software, in
   effect students are required to give up their privacy, and digital
   freedom, both crucial rights in modern society, as the effect of
   needing to use nonfree software.  The right to education has
   effectively turned into an exchange for other basic rights.  This is
   not acceptable.

   Furthermore, in countries like China, 9 years of education is
   mandatory for children.  I understand this law as a means to the goal
   of creating a knowledgeble and educated society, which is good.
   However, when mandatory edication mandates nonfree software, it
   deduces to "children are required to use nonfree software".  So,
   being a child here is pretty unlucky, because there goes your right
   to privacy, your independence, and your freedom, because of a law
   that's supposed to help society.

   We need to stop using nonfree software in education.

   In th beginning of this email, I mentioned COVID-19.  You might be
   wondering how China fully put the pandemic under control in just 5
   months, which is seemingly impossible if all you know is how the US
   dealt with this situation.

   The answer is that China is implementing strict contact tracing.
   This is extremely easy because of the prevaliance of survillance.
   Many would argue that this is a benefit of survillance, which I
   believe to be true.  However, no comparisons were given between
   losing privacy and increasing the risk or infection.  Briefly
   inspecting this idea in my head, it's really hard to think about---
   privacy and freedom is important in the long term, at the cost of
   many lives in the pandemic.  The lives of these dead are gone---they
   lose not only privacy and computing freedom, they lose their lives,



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   which costs them their oppurtunity to persue their dreams in this
   world, and they have no freedom of choice, speech, etc as they aren't
   alive.  Once again, this is hard to wrap my mind around, therefore I
   would especially like to invite the community to discuss this.

   The contact tracing system used is not Free Software.  At first I
   didn't understand why (except for the explanation that they want to
   profit from harming citizens), but I noticed that the authenticity
   and accuracy of the system may be affected if users are allowed to
   modify their software.  This seems to be the core of some problems
   with regards to software freedom---here, the user is not running
   software to complete their tasks.  Rather, it's the government's way
   to maintain public safety, therefore I believe that whether users
   should be able to modify software in these conditions is up to
   discussion.  Back to the point, since a green-code proof from the
   system is needed to get in a lot of places, a person basically needs
   to use proprietary software to live a normal life (to get into coffee
   shops, for example).

   In America and other countries, things aren't that good either.  For
   one the pandemic isn't controlled well.  As a consequence, a lot of
   places require negative COVID tests to do stuff.  A thread on the
   LibrePlanet mailing list discusses this issue, as a lot of these
   tests require nonfree software on users' phones.  Note that this
   thread spans several months long, as it is a hot discussion, so look
   in the september and october archives too.  The thread explains the
   implications clearly, thus I am not discussing it here.

   (https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2021-08/
   msg00008.html. (https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-
   discuss/2021-08/msg00008.html.))

   Additionally, I heard that some US courts require Zoom for online
   cases, therefore it seems that a person' right to judicial justice
   comes at the cost of digital freedom.  I can't confirm this, but if
   that's true, I'm truely disappointed at the judicial system, even
   though I'm not a US citizen.

   I am looking foward to a freer society, or at least one where the
   above problems get solved.

   Sincerely, Andrew Yu

2.  Reply from jahoti

   Thank you for your very interesting and insightful piece on the
   topic!  It's nice to hear the personal perspective of someone inside
   China too, being the unfortunate rarity it is.



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   You're unfortunately not alone in this; the way educational
   institutions (and no doubt corporations) the world over made such
   sudden changes, even if it was understandable, is doubly traumatic
   for those of us whose perspectives were never considered.  The only
   option I could come up with for my classes was to not go- and I took
   a whole year off just trying to reverse engineer the necessary
   software!

   I completely agree- the fact that non-free software is required to
   meet legal obligations, let alone standard expectations, is
   completely unacceptable!

   However, speaking more broadly, using software in education is itself
   up for debate.  That's not to say computers should be banned from
   classrooms or that schools shouldn't teach computing skills; rather,
   some uses seem to be less about genuine evidence of educational value
   and more about schools' (or governments', or technology companies')
   lust for novelty.  Some prudence might improve education, save money,
   and make using free software a more viable option for students (and
   even teachers).

   For that matter (as a slightly off-topic personal grievance), using
   software well would be a huge improvement.  Digital signatures have
   been around for more than 20 years, yet they have still not made it
   into mainstream use, and in fact some websites implement support for
   _written signatures_!

   Indeed, any weighting of freedom against death is going to be a
   deeply uneasy one.

   For what it's worth, I would eschew a simple dichotomy to introduce a
   third option: providing tools and encouraging citizens to log
   location data for themselves, which then helps them help contact
   tracers.  In countries where authorities are trusted and can easily
   reach their citizens, this seems like a very fair balance; civil
   liberties are respected without significantly hampering disease
   control efforts.














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   Of course, if distrust is widespread or mass media are ineffective,
   this doesn't work, and in that case I'd argue limited surveillance
   requirements would be warranted.  The key word, however, if limited:
   under absolutely no circumstances must even a single data entry be
   available to the police, or marketers, or the venue a person entered,
   or anyone except contact tracers working with the individual whose
   record it is if they are confirmed to be infected.  It must also not
   include any data except that which can reliably be used to
   significantly improve tracing efforts- simply the fact that something
   could be mildly useful is not, in my opinion, an excuse for capturing
   it and putting it in a database.  Of course, it must also be deleted
   once it is no longer potentially useful.

   It's worth noting the irony that those areas were violating civil
   liberties would be least acceptable are also the kind that would have
   been more willing to do so.

   This is indeed a double injustice- as well as proprietary software,
   constant possession of a digital device (probably a tracking one) is
   made a prerequisite for many common activities as well.

   In relation to the right to modify contact tracing software, there is
   definitely a discussion to be had!  Personally I see no reason to
   restrict that right; relying heavily on the validity of the data such
   systems produce seems doomed to fail for other reasons anyway, and
   fabricating a plausible dataset is far harder than just "forgetting
   your phone at home".

   Definitely- let us hope that these measures die with the emergency
   they were a response to, and the others can be fought off
   successfully.

3.  Epilogue

   It's closed management in Shanghai again (March 2022).  This is the
   second citywide lockdown.  The last time was in 2020.

   The delta variant of the SARS-CoV-2 is partly lethal, and highly
   contagious.  It has wrecked havoc around the world, especially in
   Europe, causing hundreds of thousands of infections and thousands of
   deaths.[Citation needed] If it erupts in densely populated cities
   such as Shanghai, the consequences will be unimaginable.

   There was a recent global pandemic of the Omicron variant.
   Originally I was terrified, I thought it was a "killer" variant
   similar to Delta.  However, after reading the relevant information, I
   found that the Omicron variant is extremely contagious but has quite
   low mortality rates, slightly higher mortality rate of



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   influenza.[OMCNLM] Therefore, some countries and regions have adopted
   a normal influenza policy, that is, only the close contacts of the
   patient are isolated at home, and several tests are completed during
   the incubation period.  If the test results are all negative, the
   close contacts are allowed to resume normal life.

   Typically in Shanghai, imported cases detected at airports and train
   stations were easy to isolate and track.  However, it was the poor
   management of the hotel that received the quarantined people that
   caused Omicron to spread like crazy.[HTLOB] This also led the
   government to find that Omicron's asymptomatic infections accounted
   for a large proportion of infected people, which also showed that
   Omicron was less destructive.

   On March 10, 2022, we were notified that the teaching activities of
   primary and secondary schools in Shanghai will be online.[NCLS] The
   effect of online teaching is still incomparable to offline teaching,
   even without considering the ethical concerns of software used (see
   section 1).  I was surprised at the time, especially after finding
   out that Omicron wasn't a big deal.  Shanghai actually adopted
   administrative measures of closed management.  All residents must
   stay at home, not go out, or even go to the nearest store to buy
   food, in order to completely wipe out SARS-CoV-2.[LDPL]

   That there are actully many workers in Shanghai.  Much of their work
   cannot be done online from home.  Lockdown means that they lose their
   source of income, their purchasing power declines, and ultimately
   lead to long-term economic problems; furthermore, because the city is
   now locked down, hospitals are not accepting new patients, and even
   basic services such as ambulances and rescues are very slow.
   Shanghai usually completes 80,000 surgical operations every day,
   including routine chronic disease treatment, myocardial infarction,
   stroke and other acute problems rescue, mild disease treatment, etc.
   This has caused thousands of stroke and myocardial infarction
   patients to lose their lives[Citation needed], and people with kidney
   disease are also approaching kidney failure because they cannot
   complete dialysis.  In contrast, as of April 14, 13 of the 300,000
   infected people in Shanghai were severely ill to COVID, none of the
   13 had been vaccinated and all had serious underlying diseases.  It
   can be said that this outbreak has minimal impact on people.  In
   today's aging society, more patients with chronic diseases are
   delayed in treatment, with serious long-term consequences.  Even for
   families with relatively stable lives, not being able to go out to
   exercise or buy food will affect our quality of life.[Multiple
   citations needed]






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   Now some communities are gradually unlockdowned due to nobody testing
   positive in a long time, and people can finally go downstairs to
   stroll in the community, but they cannot leave the block.

   It's hard to tell if a lot of extra deaths were related to the
   coronavirus lockdown.  However, the government, after all, knows how
   many people die every day.  If we compare the average death rate in
   2019 with today's and find that the current rate is much higher, our
   policies need to be improved - because the virus itself cannot
   directly cause a large number of deaths.  The ultimate purpose of our
   government's policies is to benefit the people, not to disprove other
   countries' slogans of "living with the virus" and to prove that they
   have the ability to eliminate COVID.

   Politicians often sacrifice the interests of the few at the expense
   of the many in an emergency.  Kant's philosophical school criticizes
   this policy because there is no basic principle behind it, and it is
   easy to lead to the tyranny of the majority.

   During World War II, however, Turing cracked the Engima used to
   encrypt communications in Nazi Germany.  Churchill learned that the
   Nazis would attack the city of Coventry, but in order not to let the
   Nazis know that the British had cracked their code, and to ensure
   that more important German military information could be stolen in
   the future, Churchill chose not to inform the city.  In order not to
   be discovered by the Germans and to protect greater military secrets,
   Churchill decided not to warn Coventry.  Tens of thousands of British
   compatriots died in that bombing, but Britain helped the anti-fascist
   countries win World War II by stealing follow-up communications.
   Without this move, we are likely to be surrounded by a greater evil,
   namely fascism.

   But this time, we are probably not sacrificing the interests of the
   few for the good of the many.  This time, the severe rate is
   extremely low, and the strict blockade and prevention and control
   have led to more and wider trauma.  We may well be sacrificing the
   interests of the many for the interests of the few.  Nor can I think
   of any ethics and principles that compel us to do so.

   The founder of classical liberalism, John Locke, believed that in
   order to protect their negative freedoms (such as the right to life
   and property rights), people ceded some of their freedoms and rights
   to the government, and the government replaced the powerless
   individuals to protect their rights.  But when people shout "We need
   food" on the balcony, when someone is lying on the ground of the
   community with a simple fracture and the ambulance needs to be
   approved by the neighborhood committee and reported to the higher-
   level to enter the community, we need to rethink the policy.



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4.  Conclusion

   To be written.

5.  Government Considerations

   To be written.

6.  Normative References

   [OMCNLM]   World Health Organization, "The Omicron variant: sorting
              fact from myth", January 2022,
              <https://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/health-
              emergencies/pages/news/news/2022/01/the-omicron-variant-
              sorting-fact-from-myth>.

7.  Informative References

   [HTLOB]    The Economic Observer, "Erroneous Treatment of Personnel
              in Huating Hotel causes outbreak", March 2022,
              <http://www.eeo.com.cn/2022/0311/525034.shtml>.

   [LDPL]     Shanghai Government, "Policy regarding lockdowns", March
              2022,
              <https://www.shbsq.gov.cn/shbs/bsdt/20220414/337001.html>.

   [NCLS]     The Economic Observer, "Shanghai schools pivot to
              e-learning following COVID-19 outbreak", March 2022,
              <http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202203/11/
              WS622b0f91a310cdd39bc8c180.html>.

   [THREAD]   Yu, A., "On Free Software, Education in China and the
              COVID-19 Pandemic", October 2021,
              <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-
              discuss/2021-10/msg00011.html>.

Acknowledgements

   To be written.

Contributors

   To be written.

Author's Address

   Andrew Yu
   The 2nd School Aff. to FDU



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   Email: andrew@andrewyu.org
   URI:   https://www.andrewyu.org/

















































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